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Foodie fun: Lubbock food blogger sharing her zesty bites

Meagan Wied has made cooking, and writing about cooking, her full-time job

Meagan Wied, a food blogger, writes down the ingredients she uses for a broccoli and basil pesto spaghetti at her home in Lubbock. Wied writes and photographs her dishes for various food related websites. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

Meagan Wied, a food blogger, measures olive oil for a broccoli and basil pesto spaghetti at her home in Lubbock. Wied writes and photographs her dishes for various food related websites. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

Broccoli and basil pesto spaghetti created by Meagan Wied, a food blogger, at her home in Lubbock. Wied writes and photographs her dishes for various food related websites. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

Meagan Wied, a food blogger, photographs her dishes for various food related websites at her home in Lubbock. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

Meagan Wied, a food blogger, cuts broccoli for a basil pesto spaghetti at her home in Lubbock. Wied writes and photographs her dishes for various food related websites. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

Meagan Wied, a food blogger, writes and photographs her dishes for various food related websites at her home in Lubbock. (Shannon Wilson/AJ Media)

If you liked what Meagan Wied brought to the potluck at your house this weekend, get the recipe. She’s never making it again.

That is the one downside Meagan, along with husband Shaun Wied, can point to when discussing her food blog, A Zesty Bite — they never get the same dish twice.

Meagan started the blog in 2010 as a side gig to her day job in the oil and gas industry. She enjoyed reading food blogs (she follows 80), so she grabbed her little camera, set up a website and started blogging.

“I would literally make dinner, stand over it and take a photo,” Meagan said.

The blog’s traffic took off about a year and a half ago, after she bought a new camera, went to blogging conferences and looked into advertising and focused all the time she had been putting into her job into her blog — time she needs since she posts new recipes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. (See why she can’t repeat recipes? They’d be eating all the time!)

Meagan gets inspiration for recipes from all sorts of places: restaurants, food blogs and magazines, Pinterest. Sometimes she’ll take a recipe she’s seen and change up a few ingredients to achieve a dish she likes better. Other times, she’ll just see a picture or get an idea and create the recipe from scratch. She also creates recipes based on what produce is on sale when she goes to the grocery store or farmers market.

Her blog has grown enough to attract sponsor companies, who either provide their ingredients for her to build a recipe around, often giving her a few other criteria as well. She’s at the point in her cooking that usually she can make a dish once and get it about right.

Not that it’s been all perfect cupcakes and tasty casseroles. Meagan, like anyone else who’s spent any time in the kitchen, has had her failures.

Like the first time she made pasta.

“It came out looking like Rice Krispies,” she said. “I could not get the dough to form.”

Or the time she envisioned brownies with Cadbury eggs: “Sugar overload and hard as a rock.”

Or a recent family gathering when she made a no-bake pie with animal cracker crust: “It just had no flavor to it.”

“I have a lot that don’t work out,” she said with a laugh.

And although Meagan spends enough time in the kitchen to qualify herself as something of an expert, she doesn’t hail from the too-fancy-for-a-normal-person-to-make camp.

Her recipes are mostly fairly simple and can be made by anyone with basic cooking experience and normal kitchen tools. This is partly to ensure she can get return readers and partly because, well, she has a toddler who not only wants time with Mom but also wants to eat every day.

“Sometimes it’s, ‘What can I whip together, photograph and still eat at 6:15,’ ” she said.

Hate cooking? There’s more

Meagan and Shaun also write www.LBKfoodie.com, where they review local restaurants.

Now, a word of caution — you won’t find any negative reviews on their blog. They’re trying to keep it pleasant, both said; if they didn’t like a restaurant’s food or its service, they simply don’t write it up for the blog.

“It’s a tough industry,” Shaun said. “All you hear is bad.”

They stay away from chain restaurants, so the blog is full of local eateries like West Crust Pizza, Simply Decadent Bakery and the farmers market. Yes, the farmers market. It’s about as local an eatery as you can get without picking peas from your backyard.

LBK Foodie doesn’t get updated anywhere near as often as A Zesty Bite does, though. They can only eat so much in a week.

“I feel like her blog has taken off so much that we haven’t had time to eat out,” Shaun said.

heidi.toth@lubbockonline.com

• 766-8706

Follow Heidi on Twitter

@heidi_toth

On the Web

■ www.azestybite.com

■ www.lbkfoodie.com

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Dear Heloise: I enjoy your travel suggestions, but I have one more thing to add to your carry-on bag: food. Years ago, we took a trip to a small island in the Caribbean, but with all the switching of planes, delays and lost luggage, we didn’t get to our hotel until 2 a.m., and everything was closed. After 22 hours of travel, we had one breadstick to share between us. We still laugh about it, but now we travel with some packaged food in our carry-on bags, even if it’s only energy bars. — Marie M., via email